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In Version 11 of InfoSphere MDM, some big changes happened. One change that might leave you scratching your head is the addition of new and changed terms for some familiar components. We also have a couple new components, so those might be unfamiliar too. Let's take a quick walk through the changed terms to get you started.

Product names

The first thing that you'll notice is an emphasis on capabilities rather than product names. You might not see these familiar product names anymore:

InfoSphere MDM Server

Initiate Master Data Service (MDS)

Other Initiate product names

Instead, you’ll see references to technical capabilities that those products achieve:

Technical capability

Previous product name

virtual MDM

Initiate Master Data Service

physical MDM

InfoSphere MDM Server

hybrid MDM

InfoSphere MDM Server and Initiate Master Data Service

You might be wondering what exactly these technical capability terms mean. You can use virtual, physical, and hybrid MDM to manage your master data, whether you store that data in a distributed fashion, in a centralized repository, or in a combination of both.

The following definitions show the differences and the relationships among the technical capabilities:

virtual MDM

The management of master data where master data is created in a distributed fashion on source systems and remains fragmented across those systems with a central "indexing" service.

physical MDM

The management of master data where master data is created in (or loaded into), stored in, and accessed from a central system.

hybrid MDM

The management of master data where a coexistence implementation style combines physical and virtual technologies.

Another new area that you’ll notice is a unified server, which is referred to by one common term:

Earlier terms

Current term

InfoSphere MDM Server

Initiate Master Data Service

MDM Hub, MDM Server

master data engine

MDM operational server

The former InfoSphere MDM Server and the former Initiate Master Data Service are combined to share a single infrastructure in the application server. That single infrastructure is called the MDM operational server or operational server for short. The operational server is the software that provides services for managing and taking action on master data. The operational server includes the data models, business rules, and functions that support entity management, security, auditing, and event detection. For detailed descriptions and diagrams, see the architecture and concepts topic.

Records, member records, and entities

Finally, the concepts of entities and records were clarified:

entity

A single unique object in the real world that is being mastered. Examples of an entity are a single person, single product, or single organization.

record

The storage representation of a row of data.

member record

The representation of the entity as it is stored in individual source systems. Information for each member record is stored as a single record or a group of records across related database tables

Depending on your implementation style, these concepts reflect the technical capabilities of virtual, physical, and hybrid MDM. For example, an entity in virtual MDM is assembled dynamically based on the member records by using linkages and then is stored in the MDM database. Conversely, an entity in physical MDM is based on matching records from the source systems that are merged to form the single entity. For details, see the diagrams and definitions for these concepts.

I’ll leave a discussion of hybrid MDM to a future article. If you’d like to read some conceptual topics about hybrid MDM now, see its technical overview.